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US Hacker Sets Off 156 Sirens At Midnight (dallasnews.com)
"I had the displeasure of being awoken at midnight to the sounds of civil-defense/air-raid sirens," writes very-long-time Slashdot reader SigIO, blaming "some schmuck with a twisted sense of humor." The Dallas News reports:
Rocky Vaz, director of Dallas' Office of Emergency Management, said that all 156 of the city's sirens were activated more than a dozen times... Dallas officials blame computer hacking for setting off emergency sirens throughout the city early Saturday... It took until about 1:20 a.m. to silence them for good because the emergency system had to be deactivated. The system remained shut down Saturday while crews safeguarded it from another hack.
The city has figured out how the emergency system was compromised and is working to prevent it from happening again, he said... The city said the system should be restored Sunday or Monday.
City officials reported 4,400 calls to their 9-1-1 emergency phone number in the first four hours of Saturday morning, with over 800 occurring in that first 15 minutes when all 156 sirens started going off simultaneously.
The city has figured out how the emergency system was compromised and is working to prevent it from happening again, he said... The city said the system should be restored Sunday or Monday.
City officials reported 4,400 calls to their 9-1-1 emergency phone number in the first four hours of Saturday morning, with over 800 occurring in that first 15 minutes when all 156 sirens started going off simultaneously.
He's a dick who doesn't give a shit about endangering people who really need emergency services.
Dear Texas: you have shit security and morons managing it. This is dangerous. I sounded the appropriate warning systems.
There have been recent reports of problems with the Dallas 911 infrastructure causing hold times and delays which resulted in deaths. This may have been an attempt to further highlight the problems.
City officials reported 4,400 calls to their 9-1-1 emergency phone number in the first four hours of Saturday morning, with over 800 occurring in that first 15 minutes when all 156 sirens started going off simultaneously.
People, people, people, when the emergency sirens are sounding, the authorities already know about the emergency. You don't need to call 9-1-1 to tell them about it, really.
People are so incredibly stupid.
Let me guess, SQL injection strikes again?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I've seen municipal systems that were set up years ago without any hardware firewalls, just Windows XP. They ignored my advice to harden the systems. It's alarming that towns are not fully proactive about their municipal Internet-of-things. This alarm system in Dallas is simply mischief that points out the flaws in one system. Other systems, some critical to a town's functioning, are still vulnerable. Politicians are mostly dumbasses that run on ideas, but once in office are dumbfounded, dazed and confused., on all levels of government.
Everywhere has shit security. Every manager is a moron. Everything is dangerous.
A door being unlocked does not give one the right to steal what's behind it, and similarly having a vulnerable system does not give one the right to attack it.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Having in the past been "one of those weird people interested in warning sirens as a hobby", I have a fair bit of knowledge to how insecure their control systems actually are, and thus how trivially easy it is to compromise them. Although security is slowly improving, a lot of older siren systems are controlled using unencrypted analog radio signals transmitting standard DTMF (telephone-type) tones. For a malicious person, it is shockingly easy for them to turn on an off-the-shelf police scanner, find the frequency used to control the system, record the activation signal (such as during a regular monthly test), then at a later time use an illegal transmitter of some sort to rebroadcast that recorded activation signal on the same frequency over and over. I do not know what control method Dallas uses for their siren system, but the fact that one of the news articles (CBS News) I read about this said the FCC has been asked to help investigate leads me to believe more than likely such an attack was utilized...and this isn't the first time such has happened.
You know Russia has subs parked on every undersea communication link that the US has right? The first blow in any war will be the US having its metaphorical eyes, ears, and tongue hacked off.
So the sirens sound, and presumably the North Koreans have a nuclear strike on the way. And what do the good citizens do? _nothing_. Only 4400 actually tried to figure out what was wrong; the rest simply ignored it.
You might as well get rid of the entire system, nobody cares about it anyway...
UID doesn't really tell us anything beyond how long ago someone registered their account... I was reading Slashdot for several years before I ever registered an account. Might still have been in the 6 digits, I don't really know. I also don't really care.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
The article did not say what the immediate response of the authorities was, did radio and TV stations promptly transmit a 'do not worry' message?
How does this work in the US ?
Here around in Europe, the authorities are supposed to immediately broadcast informations about the alert on all available channels (TV, radio, web, public announcement systems, etc.) informing about the nature of the threat and the proper procedure to follow to stay sage.
(Well in theory. In practice, given the relative peacefulness of life Europe, 99.9% times you're going to hear a siren, it's just a test of the system as announced the day before in the local newspaper / newscast, and the only thing you're supposed to do is just check that you can hear them and then eventually proceed with the announced evacuation drill that your employer has planned to coincide on that day).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You know Russia has subs parked on every undersea communication link that the US has right? The first blow in any war will be the US having its metaphorical eyes, ears, and tongue hacked off.
Hence the interest in satellite-to-satellite communications.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You know Russia has subs parked on every undersea communication link that the US has right? The first blow in any war will be the US having its metaphorical eyes, ears, and tongue hacked off.
Hence the interest in satellite-to-satellite communications.
Sure, but the Russians have subs parked near every satellite too -- checkmate.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
It's Russia. If that's not paranoia, the odds are that those subs have been there since before the USSR collapsed--and are still there because they're not going anywhere, unless somebody works out how to tow a mildly defunct sub that can't manage to surface.
I'm getting rather amused by the Left's current paranoia about Russia's abilities. I'm more inclined to think that this air raid siren hack will turn out to be the result of incompetence, particularly given the speed of the patching of security. It looks suspiciously like they'd been told politely to patch, were too lazy to patch, and got put in a position where they had to patch.